The holiday decorations are now (hopefully) put away, and fond memories of merriment from the past month or so are behind us. All that remains now is the time-honored tradition of the New Year’s Resolution. This should not surprise most of you, but the perennial favorite is usually a combination of ‘lose weight, eat healthier, get in better shape.’ Pondering my own resolutions to continue on a healthier path got me thinking about what it means to get your company in ‘Open Source Shape.’

There are many parallels to successfully getting yourself in better physical shape and getting your company started on the right foot to more successful and productive use of open source. Let’s take a look at a few of these examples below, pulling some lessons from the exercise world that you can apply in your enterprise.

Producing a Red Hat Training course takes a lot of hard, but also thankful, work. In this series of posts I will explore the workflow that goes into producing a single course.

To satisfy our technical readers we still start this series with a post about the tools we use to produce our output documents, from the slide-decks used by our instructors, through the PDF files sent to our printers to produce the printed version of our Instructor Guides and Student Workbooks, to the HTML content and stylesheets used for our Red Hat Online Learning offering.

Single Source Publishing

All of our course materials are authored in DocBook, an XML dialect designed for producing texts, ranging from a one page article all the way up to a set of multiple books. Using DocBook we can then easily convert a single set of source files describing a book into a wide range of output formats using XSL transforms.

Starting research on how to migrate your applications to JBoss can be an overwhelming process. Taking the migration in small steps will help manage expectations and increase the success of the effort. The major steps for planning include creating a project management office, completing a current state analysis, and creating a diagram specifying how applications interface with each other throughout your organization. With that information in hand you are ready to create a project plan and begin the migration.

Create a Project Management Office (PMO)
Decide which project managers will be the overall leads of the project. If you are missing resources that are capable of project managing, Red Hat Consulting can help augment your PMO and train your project managers for migrations.

The PMO will handle scheduling by creating a project plan. The project plan should originally be a high level document specifying the list of applications and the project start and end date. Managing and mitigating risks is the number one goal of the project manager. The PMO will also be in charge of holding individuals accountable for sticking to the project plan after achieving buy-in as well as coordinating communication throughout all of the necessary parties including infrastructure, database, and application teams.

As we kickstart the new year, we thought we’d begin by putting a proper end to 2012 and giving a second look to our most viewed posts. Hope everyone had a great holiday season and best wishes for a fantastic 2013.